The University of Idaho appears to be moving in the right direction to meet UI President Chuck Staben’s long-term enrollment goals based off new numbers released by the university this week.
According to a press release issued Oct. 19, overall student enrollment for fall 2016 is up 3.6 percent from last year to 11,780 students.
The last time UI saw an overall student enrollment increase was 2012.
Diamond Koloski | Argonaut
Students relax on the Tower Lawn during Palousafest on Saturday evening.
UI Provost and Executive Vice President John Wiencek said the increase was due to a number of factors, including barriers the university worked to remove for high school students, such as eliminating a $60 application fee for in-state students.
New high school students contributed to the enrollment increase, going from 417 to 784 students for a 93.6 percent increase.
Wiencek attributed that increase to students enrolling in dual-credit courses.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in the number of high school students enrolling for dual-credit here in the fall, and so that impacted our enrollment numbers more substantially than we anticipated,” Wiencek said.
Wiencek said consistent future enrollment increases are the plan. He said the goal for next year according to the strategic plan is roughly a 5 percent increase in overall enrollment. The 5 percent increase would have UI at 12,000 students this academic year and 12,500 by next year.
New student enrollment is up by 20 percent, from 3,753 students to 4,503. Continuing student enrollment numbers are down 4.5 percent, from 7,619 to 7,276.
International student enrollment was also an area of decline, down 10.5 percent from last year.
Wiencek said that decline was due to global trends of reduction in foreign home country support, especially from oil-producing countries that may be facing decreases in production. Wiencek said UI administrators have been in conversation with a variety of vendors who could help set up a kind of pathways program for international students to brush up on their language skills, get their transcripts up to UI standards, take courses and do more to prepare them to transfer into a mainline program to study at UI.
“So, we are going to be hopefully putting something like that in place within the next year and we think we’ll be able to turn those international student numbers around,” Wiencek said.
The decline in international students does not appear to have negatively affected UI’s ethnically diverse students. The number of UI students who identify as a member of an ethnic or racially diverse group increased from 16.2 percent in fall 2015 to 23.2 percent in fall 2016, according to a press release.
Moving forward, Wiencek said the university’s No. 1 focus is on faculty and staff, and making sure they receive a fair market wage.
“We lose quite a few of our staff to Washington State and we want to retain them here,” Wiencek said.
He said the administration also wants to get UI’s recruiting team completely rounded out and put a bigger emphasis on student retention.
“We’re cautiously optimistic that we can push retention up this year,” Wiencek said.
Taylor Nadauldcan be reached at[email protected]